"It's almost sacrosanct to refer to it as one of the great games of all time," says CBS' Dick Enberg, who called the 1979 game on NBC with Billy Packer and the late Al McGuire. "But had Magic and Bird been NBA busts, I don't think we'd look back on it as a great game. It was not a great final. As I left, I had the same feelings as after Super Bowl blowouts — that it wasn't very exciting."

Enberg suggests McGuire wasn't exactly wowed, either. At dinner afterward, he lied down in a booth and went to sleep: "That's how excited Al was."

Packer, who called 34 Final Fours before leaving CBS last year, also says the game got better after its final buzzer. "It was one of the poorer finals games I ever broadcast," he says. "What Bird-Magic eventually became made that game, not the other way around. That's the real world."

Viewers can decide for themselves as ESPN2 re-airs the game Friday (7 p.m. ET) and Sunday (2 p.m. ET) and includes current interviews with Enberg and players in the game.

The game drew 24.1% of U.S. TV households, which is the highest rating ever for college basketball — and double last year's Memphis-Kansas title-game rating. But Enberg suggests college basketball's appeal really pivoted 11 years before, when he called Elvin Hayes' Houston team upsetting Lew Alcindor's top-ranked UCLA team in the first basketball game on prime-time TV.

"That was the launching pad," Enbreg says.

Contributing: Michael McCarthy

Caddies joining ranks of miked-up

With TV microphones already regularly eavesdropping on baseball managers, NBA coaches and NASCAR crew chiefs, viewers should be able to listen in on golf caddies.

And two caddies will be miked next Saturday by NBC at the Shell Houston Open, but just in a test that won't make it on-air. But NBC golf producer Tommy Roy isn't holding his breath: "As soon as a player steps away, you won't hear his side of the conversation. I'm not sure this is going to be any great breakthrough."

Or even an improvement on the status quo. NBC, more than any other network carrying golf, lets viewers regularly eavesdrop on player and caddies via microphones held about 10 paces from the conversations.

Roy said diplomacy is the key: "Our audio guys have developed relationships that's let them get closer. If they signal our guys to get back, they get back."

Miking caddies might allow TV to get new sounds, such as conversations on greens that are now beyond reach. But Roy doesn't sound too psyched about taking on a role — like broadcasters have in baseball — of having to worry if miked-up caddies trust the network to carefully edit audio before it airs on tape delay: "I prefer to do it live as we do now. That's us trusting them."

Virtual Open: Bethpage at your keyboard

Coming soon to your laptop: The U.S. Open's fairways.

The U.S. Golf Association will stage its first Virtual U.S. Open Championship — with both being played on the same course.

The USGA, working with the online producer World Golf Tour (wgt.com), took nearly 100,000 photos of Bethpage State Park in Farmingdale, N.Y. — the site of the June Open — for a free online video game meant to mirror Open conditions.

Says USGA spokesman Dave Fannuchi: "We try to simulate things like hole locations to make it close to what players will face in reality."

Available on usopen.com at no charge, practice starts April 13 with qualifying running May 25 through June 21. A round takes 30-45 minutes.

The top 156 qualifiers go for the title June 22.

They'll catch a break. Since that's the day after the real Open ends, they'll have had plenty of chances to read the greens.

WBC far from a ratings classic

MLB Commissioner Bud Selig this week promised the World Baseball Classic, which will be staged again in 2013, "is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and you can count on that."

But, at least when it came to U.S. viewers, the event's second edition this month only drew about as much attention from TV viewers as the inaugural WBC in 2006.

ESPN's nine WBC games this month averaged 1.3% of cable/satellite households, which translates to about 1.4 million households — up 8% from 2006. ESPN2's games averaged 0.5%. That's down from 0.8% in 2006, but this year ESPN2 had fewer games with the U.S. team and more games airing between midnight and dawn in the U.S.

How ESPN's WBC average of 1.3% stacks up with other sports: That's the same average it got on men's college basketball conference tournament games this month — and nearly the 1.4% it averaged for MLB games last season.

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